My scholarship has moved from work on implicit moral rationality (in the 1990s), to moral education in the schools (late 1990s- early 2000s), to the neurobiology of moral development (mid 2000s to present), to the study of evolved parenting practices (presently), and the study of small-band hunter-gatherers who represent the type of society in which humans evolved (presently). My concerns are for developmental optimization and fulfilling human essence--communal imagination. I put some of this together in various articles and chapters (see "DOWNLOAD PAPERS") but mostly in my 2014 book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom.

Collaborating with the MN Dept of Education, when I was at the University of Minnesota we had $1 million Character Education Partnership grant funds from the USDE to collaborate with school teams and develop a flexible approach to moral character education ("Community Voices and Character Education"). We aimed to help educators incorporate ethical skill development into regular academic instruction. An earlier version of the guidebooks we developed are downloadable for free from a link here: http://cee.nd.edu/curriculum/ and the later versions are purchasable as noted.

In that project we on the university team compiled the set of skills that comprise the skills toolkit for moral character plus the pedagogical approach that works best (novice-to-expert apprenticeship). We identified skills and subskills and organized them by four levels of expertise development. We also made suggestions for supportive climate elements for each skill as well as student self-monitoring. The teams of educators took this information and adapted it for their own circumstances (selecting which skills to work on and which teachers would implement them). This made it hard to evaluate since every school did things differently and we had troubles with pre-post testing during the evaluation year (I had moved to ND) but we got a publication (Narvaez et al., 2004). Reanalyses were done in Narvaez (2012).

The Integrative Ethical Education model (IEE,) developed after I moved to Notre Dame from the U of MN, put everything into five basic steps.